Prisoner of the Vatican (18 page)

The French insisted on keeping the
Orénoque
in the Italian harbor, prompting a new drumbeat of denunciations of the French in the Italian press. A year later, Visconti again wrote to Nigra, expressing his fear that, with the upcoming opening of the 1874 session of the Italian parliament, he would be asked to explain why the government was allowing a French warship to remain so long in its harbor. Given the ease with which the French could get a ship to Civitavecchia should the pope request it, he wrote, it was difficult to see the continued presence of the
Orénoque
as anything other than a willful provocation. Finally, on October 13, the
Orénoque
sailed for France. To console the pope, the French informed him that they would keep another ship in Corsican waters, ready to come to his aid at any time.
¹⁶

In all these years, no European monarch would visit the Italian king in his new capital for fear of antagonizing his Catholic subjects. One monarch alone visited Rome. In an ill-fated effort to bring peace between the pope and the new Italian state, Don Pedro II, the emperor of Brazil, arrived in 1871. A pious member of the Portuguese royal family, of the house of Alcantara, Pedro was the titular head of the Catholic Church in Brazil. On November 27, Pedro was ushered into the Vatican hall reserved for receiving monarchs, where the pope awaited him.

"What is it that Your Imperial Majesty desires?" asked the wary Pius IX, no doubt warned of the emperors intentions.

"Holy Father," he replied, "please do not call me Emperor, as I come to you as the Count of Alcantara."

"Very well, then, dear Signor Count, what is it that you want of me?"

"I have come to beg Your Holiness to allow me to present the king of Italy to you."

At this, the pope rose from his chair and, staring him in the eyes, replied:

"You have come to me with such a proposal in vain, Emperor. The King of Piedmont can first bring an end to his sacrilegious acts and restore to the Church the lands he has stolen from it. Then I will permit you to present him to me. Before that, never! I would advise you against becoming his representative, for that would be beneath your dignity. Given the present state of things, he will never come here with my permission. If he wants, he can break open the doors of my palace as he knocked down the gates of Rome with his cannons, and as he forced open the door of my palace at the Quirinal. But in that case, as he enters, he will see me leaving by the opposite door."
¹⁷

Although rapidly losing hope that any of the European rulers would come to his aid, the pope never lost his belief that God would not long allow the sorry state of affairs to continue. He now placed his faith in the power of the Catholic people. And in appealing to them for help, no image proved more potent than that of the papal prisoner of the Vatican.

The prisoner image was not new. In 1860, Count Charles de Montalembert, deeply involved in the Catholic Church in France, wrote a warning that, in the wake of the taking of Rome in 1870,
Civiltà Cattolica
and other Catholic papers began quoting regularly: "You can become the rulers of Rome as the barbarians were before you, and all the persecutors from Alarico to Napoleon. But you will never be sovereigns and never the equal of the pope. Pius IX may perhaps become your prisoner, your victim, but he will never be your accomplice. As a prisoner, he will become your cruelest embarrassment, your most horrific punishment." He further prophesied: "The spectacle of this Old Man, robbed of the patrimony of fifteen centuries, victim of the blackest treachery, wandering the globe in search of an exile ... will raise against you and your accomplices, in everyone's hearts in all the world, a storm that will destroy you, but only after first dishonoring you forever. Take care that the Italians do not become the Jews of the Christian future. Take care that from the shores of Ireland to those of Australia, our children do not learn from the cradle to curse your name."
¹⁸

So powerful was the image of Pius IX as the prisoner of the Vatican that in France priests and nuns began to sell, as holy relics, straw that he was made to sleep on. And so dramatically did the pope's popularity, and the cult of his martyrdom, grow, especially in France, that the historian Marcel Launay dubbed the phenomenon "
papolátrie
"—papal idolatry.
¹⁹

An avalanche of letters of condolence and a huge number of petitions from the Catholic faithful around the world descended on the Vatican, commiserating with the pope on his imprisonment. One of them even came, in early 1871, from a tribe of North American Indians. "Although we poor Indians don't have very clear ideas on all that is just and right," they wrote, "nonetheless we regard it as a crime seeing how they are treating you. Not even forty or fifty winters ago, when we were still far from having any civilization, would we have behaved in such a manner toward you."
²⁰

In late August 1871, as the day for moving the Italian government to Rome approached, and with it Victor Emmanuel's move to the Quirinal Palace, the pope decided to send a private letter to the king. It was vintage Pius IX.

"They say that this metropolis," wrote the pope, "is destined to be the capital of Italy. But while I know no Rome other than the one that belongs to the Holy See and is the capital of Catholicism worldwide, it seems to me that the work of the revolution has made of this great city, not the capital of Italy, but rather of disorder, confusion, and impiety." Monasteries and convents had been seized, and even the nuns disturbed from their sacred sanctuary. "Is it possible," he asked, "that after having usurped the last bit of temporal dominion, you also want to attack the Pope in the exercise of his spiritual power?" Such outrages would have grave consequences, he warned, unleashing "those punishments that God inflicts on his enemies." Then he added his warning to the king. The attack on the papacy was just the first step on a perilous road. "Majesty, it pains me to say it, but it is certain that after having shouted 'Death to the Pope!' they will shout 'Death to the King!' For my part, I am at peace and I place myself in God's hands. But," he added, "can Your Majesty actually say that you are equally untroubled?"
²¹

Battling mounting physical ills, over the next few years the aged pope insisted on continuing to host large audiences, drawing strength from the devoted crowds. In addressing a group of Roman youth in October 1872, he used a new metaphor, but his message was unchanged: "The land that has been usurped," Pius told them, "will be like a volcano that with its flames threatens to devour all the usurpers." The following year, speaking to the heads of the religious orders, he warned that despite all the government's talk of guarantees, it in fact sought nothing other than the destruction of the Church itself. But, the pope assured the monks, the forces of evil would not succeed. "When it seemed that the Devil would triumph by means of the Aryans, and the land for a time faced the appalling prospect of being entirely infected by that heretical plague, the Church nonetheless rose up once again. And this time too it will again rise up, because there is no force that can stand against the finger of God."
²²

Although such confidence in divine intervention was widespread among the Catholic faithful, not all were so sure. Following a visit to Rome in May 1872, the priest Leonardo Murialdo, who would be made a saint a century later, described what he had found: "The priests, the bishops, and the Catholics are living a continuous and not terribly useful illusion, firmly believing that, at any moment, some miracle will take place to bring about the [Church's] triumph. And this is what is being preached from every pulpit, enraging Italian patriots and alienating the true moderates."
²³

And so the world witnessed a peculiar spectacle. Two sovereigns uneasily shared the same capital, the one—thought to be on his last legs—hurling epithets at the other, who was younger and more robust but diffident, swaggering on the battlefield but cowardly before the pope's sacred glow. Or, as the mischievous Gregorovius put it in his entry for January 12: "The Pope continues to sit like a mummy in the Vatican, while the King now and then appears, immediately to go off again on some distant shooting expedition."
²⁴

W
HILE THE POPE
was warning all who would listen that Italy's ultimate goal was to destroy the papacy and the Catholic Church, Lanza was trying to assure the world of the government's benevolence. But not all Italian patriots were so eager to contest the pope's charge. The anticlerical wing of the unification movement believed that destroying the Papal States was but one—albeit crucial—stage in the larger project of ending the anachronism that was the infallible pope himself. None held this view more firmly than the great hero of unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi. In one of many such tirades, he once urged his followers: "Fight against the Papacy, Italy's internal enemy, which has been a cancer on all humanity! Fight against the theocracy, erecting over the ashes of the papal throne a building that, based on morality and science, is worthy of being the temple of humanity!" Likewise, in a public appeal in 1872, Garibaldi urged the government to liberate Italy from the papacy, replacing it with "the religion of truth, religion without priests, based on reason and science."
¹

The hatred that Garibaldi and his comrades harbored toward the Catholic clergy—from the pope down to the village priest—could hardly have been more visceral or intense. As the enemies of Italian unification, dependent on foreign troops to protect them from the people's ire, the clergy represented the forces of darkness. Shortly after the taking of Rome, Garibaldi wrote his famous novel,
I Mille (The Thousand),
a fictional account of his triumph in Sicily and march toward the Holy City in 1860. It is a story of good against evil, and most evil of all were the Catholic clergy. "The Italian priest," Garibaldi explains early in his book, "is always the traitor of his country."

"Tyrants and priests, convents and prisons, prisons and mercenaries, there is such an affinity between these scourges of humanity as not to be able to distinguish among them, to consider them the same emanation from hell," writes Garibaldi. "When I think of the power of the priests," says one of the heroes in the book, "I think of how they have reduced even the greatest of nations to the lowest level, inflicted every kind of humiliating degradation on it, having sold it out to the foreigner so many times and, above all, having trained it to the kissing of hands, the genuflections, the fear, the prostitution, and every form of outrageous brutalization, so that in the end one of the most beautiful peoples has been stunted, bent over, made morally and materially inferior to all those peoples who once sat at their feet. Thinking of the power of the priests ... I often wonder whether these cretins ... are nothing other than one of the many families of monkeys that I saw in the New World."
²

But Garibaldi reserves his greatest hostility for the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy. "The Jesuits," he wrote, "are nothing other than hypocrites, liars, and cowards." They are "a sect whose aspiration is the idiocy and servility of all those who are not Jesuits." Italy's greatest hero pulled no punches:

Jesuitism and tyranny represent the evil found in the human family. They are the parasitical plants that want to live and eat at others' expense, and not content to eat for one, they want to eat for a hundred. To sustain their injustice, they use every atrocious means they can to dominate the common people, who in turn call them "villain." Nor are the rest of the priests much better. Wherever they are found they form the local cell dedicated to destroying the Italian homeland and selling it out to foreigners. They preach a series of idiocies about the virginity of the mother of Christ, the supernatural content of the holy wafer, and the like whose preposterous falsehood they laugh at among themselves but peddle to the credulous. "Don't do what I do, but do what I say" is their motto.
³

Italy's anticlerical movement comprised an odd assortment of the middle classes: doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals, schoolteachers, and artisans. They were found not only in the large cities, but in small and medium-sized towns as well, and in the South as well as the North. The new religion was to be the worship of science, the new creed, a faith in progress. The Catholic religion represented the hand of medieval superstition and inequality, faith in the supernatural rather than in reason. As groups of anticlericals formed throughout the country, they held conferences celebrating science and conducted civil funerals in place of funeral masses. The better to show their disdain for the Church, on Catholic holy days they held bacchanalian balls.

In 1864, the first Democratic Society of Freethinkers was formed in Siena, with the post of honorary president given to Garibaldi. The following year, societies of freethinkers were formed in Naples and Milan, and others soon sprouted up. A barrage of publications appeared, denouncing the Church, the priesthood, and the pope. Uneasily allied with these new societies were the Freemasons. While also anticlerical, they were still weak in Italy in the 1860s and 1870s and often ridiculed by the freethinkers for their secrecy and quasi-religious rites.

In January 1871, Rome's first Society of Freethinkers was founded, holding its inaugural meeting in front of the Trevi fountain. Its goal was to establish an alternative to the Vatican in Rome, eliminating both the papacy and the Church hierarchy. Rome, so long identified with the pope, would soon symbolize the triumph of reason over superstition.

Along with the freethinkers, and partially tied to them, was the republican movement—itself divided into various factions—which similarly saw the Vatican as Italy's curse. The day after Rome was taken, the first republican daily newspaper, appropriately titled
La Capitale,
appeared. As
La Capitale
saw it, an unholy alliance between the Vatican and the Italian right was the greatest threat faced by the nation. In these first days after September 20,
La Capitale,
and other papers like it, urged the government to occupy the Leonine city, move the capital to Rome without delay, ban the Jesuits, close down the religious orders, seize Church property, and keep priests out of the public schools. In January 1871,
La Capitale
began to publish a series of unflattering biographies of popes and cardinals. Its malevolent portrait of Pius IX on the twenty-fourth of the month created such an uproar that the police seized all copies of the issue. "The papacy is dead," an anticlerical deputy exclaimed in parliament that day, "and the Italian Government need only bury a cadaver."
⁴